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Howard Schultz, Chairman and CEO of Starbucks, transformed a modest Seattle coffee roaster into a money-brewing, culture-changing corporate colossus that serves 60 million customers a week. And he's far from finished.

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Howard Schultz isn't running for president, but maybe he ought to be. Walking briskly through a throng of the party faithful—in this case,
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store managers—he stops here to press the flesh, there to have a word with an admiring barista and pose for a close-up on a manager's iPhone.

"We have a CEO who's a rock star," gushes a manager from Canada, who has joined 10,000 colleagues at the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston for Starbucks' leadership conference.

Later, the singer Alicia Keys will tell the crowd that Starbucks is more than a company; it's a "movement." Would that make Schultz, chairman and CEO of the world's most recognized coffee stores, some kind of high priest, or guru, or java-swilling Gandhi?

"I'm not the messiah, believe me," he says, jokingly. But, at 59, he just might be Corporate America's most soulful leader, who cares deeply about people—his employees, customers, and the citizens of the world.

The kid from Canarsie built a benevolent retail empire that now serves 60 million customers a week.
John Keatley for Barron's

Schultz saw the future differently from the pioneers of social networking—as a place where all our gadgets and virtual connectivity would leave us very much alone. The antidote wasn't just latte, but what he describes as "a place that is safe, that respects me for my individuality, and has an environment with a sense of humanity." Not to mention Wi-Fi.

That place is Starbucks—annoyingly ubiquitous to some, a second home for the rest of us. From modest roots as a Seattle coffee roaster, the company has grown to serve 60 million customers a week in 18,000 stores in 61 countries. Mainland China, the land of tea, is one of its fastest-growing markets.

COFFEE PAID, AND PAID well, except for a humbling stretch in the mid-2000s, before Schultz, who had stepped aside as CEO, returned to right the ship. In the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, Starbucks' revenue rose 14%, to a record $13.3 billion, on impressive growth of 7% in sales at stores open at least a year. Per-share profit perked up 10%, to $1.79, and the company recently raised its fiscal 2013 earnings outlook to a range of $2.06 to $2.15 a share. Starbucks also boosted its quarterly dividend by 24%, to 21 cents a share, for an annual yield of 1.6%.

Investors who purchased Starbucks shares (ticker: SBUX), now $52, at the initial public offering in June 1992 have enjoyed a 25% compounded annual return. Those who bought the stock two years ago are sitting on gains of 70%.

Schultz credits Starbucks' achievements to its employees. "The company wouldn't succeed if the proof of everything we do wasn't in the cup," he says. "But equal to that, or even greater, is the relationship our people have with our customers."

Yet, anyone who knows the hard-charging CEO, who rises at 4:30 a.m. and looks at store comps even before downing his first cup of coffee, will tell you where credit really belongs—with Schultz's merchandising genius and uncommon ability to connect with almost everyone he meets. Nancy Koehn, a leadership historian at Harvard Business School who has done multiple case studies of Starbucks since 1995, likens Schultz to a cultural anthropologist who is as much at home chatting with a cab driver as rubbing elbows with the elite on a private jet. He is something of a hero, she says, to many successful and would-be entrepreneurs.

SCHULTZ UNDERSTOOD FROM a young age how showmanship can sell. On a visit in 1963 to the Horn & Hardart Automat on New York's 57th Street, where he and his aunt had gone for a bite after watching the Rockettes perform at Radio City Music Hall, Schultz, then 10, experienced the wonder of retrieving a slice of apple pie from one of a bank of small windows that spanned an entire wall. He was awestruck when another serving automatically took its place, as if by magic.

Twenty years later, in the spring of 1983, he felt a similar magic in the coffee bars of Milan, where he was attending an international housewares show as head of marketing at the original Starbucks. "The romance of the coffee bar, the sense of community, the coffee bringing people together, coffee as a conduit for conversation—all that captivated me," he says.

Milan was a world away from the Bayview housing projects of Canarsie, Brooklyn, where Schultz and his younger sister and brother were raised in a cramped apartment. One of the defining moments of his life came when he was seven years old and saw that his parents were worried about how to put food on the table after his father broke a leg on his diaper-delivery route. Nor was there health insurance to pay for medical bills for his mother, who was seven months pregnant.

"A big piece of my competitive spirit is linked to growing up in Brooklyn, in the projects, living on the other side of the tracks and wanting more out of life," Schultz says, adding that secretly he has returned to the old neighborhood "just to feel it, to remind myself about where I came from and who I am."

Schultz's childhood memories played a role in shaping Starbucks' benevolent management policies. In the late 1980s, years before the company went public, Schultz battled his directors to grant health insurance to even part-time employees, arguing that the benefits of employee loyalty and lower attrition, the absence of which plagued similar establishments, would far outweigh the significant annual cost.

Since Schultz initiated Bean Stock, the company's stock and options plan, in May 1991, Starbucks has created $850 million in value for its employees—money that has been used to buy homes, finance educations, and much more. Schultz was "determined that should he ever run a company, he would see to it that everybody got a piece of the rock," says Norman Lear, a mentor and friend, and creator of the iconic television comedy All in the Family.

SCHULTZ WOULD BE THE first to say, however, that living in a building where 150 families shared a single elevator, and attending Canarsie High School, where 5,700 students jostled for their own piece of the American dream, had its advantages. "It created a sensitivity in me, a level of curiosity about what was beyond that," he says.

He also credits his mother, "an extraordinary woman," with insight and perspective well beyond her education and experience, with giving him the courage to forge his own path out of the projects. Her idealism, and her admiration for President John F. Kennedy, "gave her a strong belief that dreams in America could come true," he says.

Schultz's first stop after Brooklyn was Northern Michigan University, which he attended on a football scholarship, and from which he earned a degree in communications in 1975. He then returned to New York and a sales job with Xerox, knocking on 50 doors a day in midtown Manhattan to sell word-processing systems. Next he joined the U.S. housewares division of a Swedish company, where he noticed that a four-store chain in Seattle called Starbucks Coffee, Tea and Spice was placing unusually large orders for a certain type of drip coffee maker.

On a visit to the first Starbucks, a narrow storefront in Seattle's Pike Place Market where a violinist played Mozart at the entrance, he sampled Sumatra coffee from a French press. As he wrote in Pour Your Heart Into It, a memoir and history of Starbucks published in 1997, "I felt as though I had discovered a whole new continent."

After persuading Starbucks to give him a job, Schultz opened the first coffee bar inside a Starbucks store. He then left the company briefly to start his own company, Il Giornale, modeled on Italian coffee bars. In August 1987, he acquired Starbucks for $3.8 million, and the rest is well-brewed history.

"The journey of where coffee comes from and how it is grown captured my imagination," he says. "It provided me with this blank canvas on which to be able to create. I've always viewed myself, above all else, as a merchant, and we are storytellers. We have to be able to bring a product to life through the romance and the language of the story, and the story has to be authentic and has to reveal something to the customer."

SCHULTZ CUTS A DAPPER FIGURE, and, though reserved at times, he fondly embraces those with whom he feels connected. Close associates point to kindness as one of his essential traits. "He'll send you an e-mail while he's on vacation at Christmas, saying, 'I just want to tell you how much I appreciate you,' '' says Starbucks director Mellody Hobson, who is president of Ariel Investments in Chicago. "Somehow he is simultaneously giant in his thoughts and aware of the details."

That winning combination propelled Starbucks through the 1990s, as the chain blanketed the landscape and changed the culture, helping foster the sense of community so alluring to the boss. In 2000, with 2,600 stores operating in 13 countries and the stock price surging, Schultz decided to step away from day-to-day operations, becoming chairman and chief strategist and pursuing other interests.

Alas, Starbucks began to veer from its roots, too, into such unlikely adventures as film production. As competition increased, the company substituted store expansion for strategy, hampering sales and profits, which cratered the stock. In February 2007, Schultz wrote a blistering internal memo about "the watering down of the Starbucks experience," which was leaked to the press. The following January, he abruptly dismissed then CEO Jim Donald and took the job back.

Schultz acted quickly to close 600 stores and renovate thousands of others, update an aging supply chain and infrastructure, and restore customer service to the level that the public had come to expect. At the time, it was hard to imagine that the company's greatest days lay ahead.

LATELY STARBUCKS HAS BEEN brimming with fresh initiatives in its ceaseless attempt to appeal to the 20-somethings who man the espresso machines and their parents, who cough up $4 for coffee. The company has launched Starbucks K Cups for single-serve coffee machines, VIA instant-coffee packets, and the Verismo, its own single-serve machine. It also has pioneered the use of Square Wallet, a mobile-payment app, and will soon debut a customer-loyalty program linking grocery-store purchases to those in Starbucks outlets. Next could be a bigger push into the multibillion-dollar market for health and wellness foods, spurred by the acquisition of the Evolution Fresh juice business. Recent purchases of the Teavana tea chain and La Boulange Bakery, a small San Francisco–area baked-goods concern, could open even more channels for growth.

Starbucks is socially networked, with 53 million Facebook followers and 3 million Twitter followers worldwide. It is also socially responsible, and is involved with job-creation, community development, and small-business-lending organizations. Schultz is animated by public-policy issues, but has no plans to run for public office.

Nor does he intend to retire, at least not anytime soon. "I never allowed myself to imagine I'd be in this position," he says. "Now that I'm here, my dreams are bigger."